[Nix-dev] Stackage Support Will Be Discontinued

[Thomas Tuegel]

Hi Peter and Anthony,

On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 4:04 PM, Peter Simons <simons at nospf.cryp.to> wrote:
> Hi Anthony,
>
>  >> [What is] a concrete use case that works for you today but that
>  >> won't work after LTS-4 has been dropped?
>  >
>  > Someone who has a project that works with package versions in LTS-4,
>  > but hasn't yet been upgraded to LTS-5 or 6. They can simply refer to
>  > LTS-4 in their shell.nix for haskell packages.
>
> Oh, but you can absolutely do that! You can extend the set of available
> packages to your heart's content and you can compose package sets that
> provide any combination of versions as you please. The Haskell
> infrastructure in Nix gives you that ability.

Let me remark on this non-sequitor. Of course Anthony or I or anyone
else could always extend or fork Nixpkgs to do whatever we want! I
don't think anyone with experience in open source software needs this
to be pointed out to them. That's obviously not Anthony's complaint,
which is rather

The choice to discontinue Stackage support makes Nixpkgs significantly
less useful to some of our users.

It seems disingenuous to pretend that some other complaint is being
made, for the sake of summarily dismissing that complaint. As
*volunteer* distribution maintainers, we are free to consider or
disregard complaints at will; there is no need to misrepresent what
people are saying.

It is completely legitimate to take the position that the benefit (to
our users like Anthony) of keeping Stackage does not outweigh the
resource cost to Nixpkgs or the technical cost of finding a more
efficient way to include those packages. This is obviously the
position that the Haskell infrastructure and Nixpkgs maintainers have
reached. Stating outright that they will not be swayed saves our users
time and frustration because they can immediately seek solutions
outside Nixpkgs.

Regards,
Thomas